Hungarian politician
who survived imprisonment and persecution
by the old regime, and was a force for
change over more than three
decades

Gabriel PartosGuardian

ON two notable
occasions separated by more than 30 years,
the Hungarian author and politician,
Miklos Vasarhelyi, who has died at
the age of 83, played an important part in
attempts to transform Hungary from a
one-party communist state into a
multi-party democracy.

The first attempt - during the 1956
uprising, when Vasarhelyi was Prime
Minister Imre Nagy's press
secretary - proved stillborn. Vasarhelyi's
punishment was a five-year prison sentence
and continued persecution in the years
after his release. The second occasion was
crowned with success when, in 1989, the
communist authorities finally accepted
that there was no alternative to a
peaceful transition to free elections.

By then Vasarhelyi was no longer acting
- as he had done in 1956 - as a reform
communist, but as a senior figure in the
democratic opposition to the decaying
regime. His reward was a seat in
parliament, where he represented the
liberal Free Democrats following the
elections of 1990.

On both occasions, Vasarhelyi's role
was more significant than his official
positions might have indicated. In
addition to being the government spokesman
in 1956, he had also been for some years a
trusted associate of Prime Minister Nagy -
one of the younger generation of
reform-minded communist intellectuals who
were urging their avuncular leader to
adopt increasingly liberal policies.

And in 1989 - by which time he was an
elder statesman of what had been the
dissident community - Vasarhelyi's
contribution to the political changes was
the outcome of patient work, often
behind-the-scenes, which he had been
carrying on for some time to unite
different strands among the democratic
opposition.

He was born in the port city of Fiume
(now Rijeka in Croatia) in what was then
part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He
was educated at Rome university before
taking a degree in law in the east
Hungarian university town of Debrecen. At
the age of 21, he joined the then illegal
Communist party, and because of his
political activities he spent two years
during the second world war in a forced
labour battalion, before joining the
anti-Nazi resistance in the final year of
the war.

With such impeccable communist
credentials, Vasarhelyi moved quickly into
several senior posts, working for the
party daily, Szabad Nep, before becoming
director of Hungarian Radio in 1950. This
was during the period of terror that
followed the trial of Laszlo Rajk,
the former foreign minister
[sic. Justice
Minister], when communists had
themselves become the victims of show
trials.

Vasarhelyi lived in fear of arrest -
though he did not dare tell his wife, in
case that might be taken as evidence of
his guilt at a subsequent trial. However,
Vasarhelyi's fear turned into hope when,
following Stalin's death in 1953,
the moderate communist official Imre Nagy
became prime minister. Vasarhelyi was
appointed deputy head of the government's
information office - but when Nagy was
removed from office during a Stalinist
backlash in 1955, Vasarhelyi and other
reformers were dismissed along with
him.

Their hopes for a more humane form of
communism - less repressive, less servile
to the Kremlin and more concerned with
improving living standards - appeared to
rise from the ashes of the Stalinist
regime, which was overthrown by the
uprising of October 1956.

The communist leadership, frightened by
the uprising, summoned Nagy to his second
premiership, seeing him as their only hope
of clinging to power. But under the
influence of his close associates,
including Vasarhelyi, Nagy gradually
adopted the goals of the students and
workers who had overthrown the old
dictatorship. Nagy formed a multi-party
government; removed censorship; and
declared Hungary's neutrality and its
withdrawal from the Soviet-dominated
Warsaw Pact.

When a Soviet army intervention on
November 4 put an end to Hungary's brief
experiment with revolutionary democracy,
Vasarhelyi was among the senior communist
officials who, along with their families,
took up an offer of asylum at the Yugoslav
embassy. After three weeks at the embassy,
Vasarhelyi and the others left after the
Soviet-backed government of Janos
Kadar had guaranteed their safety.
They were immediately kidnapped by Soviet
troops and flown to Romania, where the
families were interned.

Vasarhelyi was among the defendants at
the secret trial in Budapest in June 1958
at which Nagy and several of his
associates were sentenced to death for
treason. Vasarhelyi, who accepted his
guilt - for which in the 1990s his
rightwing opponents often criticised him -
was sentenced to five years' imprisonment,
and was released under an amnesty in
1960.

It was not until 1972 that he managed
to secure a job at the Hungarian Academy's
Institute of Literary Studies. He
concentrated on studying the history of
the press. One of his books, The Lord and
the Crown (1974), dealt with Lord
Rothermere, who during the inter-war
years championed Hungary's interests - and
whose son was at one stage offered the
vacant Hungarian throne.

A fellowship at Columbia University in
1983 led to a meeting and subsequent
friendship with George Soros, the
Hungarian-born financier and
philanthropist.
When Soros approached the Hungarian
authorities with the offer of setting up a
foundation to facilitate cultural
exchanges, he insisted on Vasarhelyi
becoming his personal representative in
Hungary.

The foundation - which has since spread
to the entire former communist world and
beyond - played a key role in providing
the brightest of Hungarian students and
professionals with the opportunity to
study or work at universities in the west.
It thus helped open up Hungary to Western
ideas. Viktor Orban, the current
prime minister, was the recipient of a
scholarship that took him to Oxford in the
late 1980s.

The Soros Foundation was not the only
way in which Vasarhelyi helped undermine
communist rule. He was a leading figure in
the democratic opposition that gradually
began to assert itself as the 1980s wore
on. He was a founding member of the
Network of Free Initiatives - which later
turned into the Free Democratic party -
and of the Committee for Historical
Justice, which set itself the task of
rehabilitating the victims of the
past.

The committee's finest mo ment came
when the remains of Imre Nagy and his
associates - who had been buried in a
secret location after their execution -
were finally given a public funeral on
June 16 1989, on the 31st anniversary of
their executions. Vasarhelyi had earlier
managed to locate the unmarked mass grave
after he had spent years befriending a
retired prison guard.

His final years were dogged by ill
health, caused by heart problems, and by
attacks from rightwing, nationalist
opponents who denounced his reform
communist past and his more recent
liberal, pro-western views.

But in spite of these polemics,
Vasarhelyi, who is survived by his wife,
Edit, and their son and two daughters,
will have a place in the pantheon of
Hungarians who struggled in different ways
to bring democracy to Hungary in the
second half of the 20th century.


Miklos Vasarhelyi, author and
politician, born October 9 1917; died July
31 2001.